Renowned Ecological Economist To Speak At St Rose

By Nancy K. Crevier

The St Rose Catholic Forum invites the public to “Ecology: A Doorway to the Mystery,” a presentation with Dr Pablo Martinez, at 7 pm, Sunday, August 2, in the Monsignor Conroy Room at St Rose of Lima, Church Hill Road. A pizza dinner will be served.

Dr Martinez is a world-renowned ecological economist working on three continents to bring harmony between nature and development. He currently teaches project management, and is professor of sustainable rural development at the University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, Spain. He also heads the graduate program in bioethics there, and has met with the Pontifical Institute on that subject.

His recent projects include a Peace Park in Nicaragua, an online university for poor rural villages, and switching farming techniques in Sierra Leone from slash-and-burn to hydroponics to resolve chronic hunger and reduce climate impacts.

Dr Martinez, the author of several books written in Spanish, is in the process of writing a book, Environmental Solidarity: Ecology as if God is Happening, edited by Newtown resident Mary Taylor. Ms Taylor is a graduate of Yale Divinity School who has taught theology, ethics, and literature for many years at the college level. She has recently taught for the Diocese of Bridgeport.

Dr Martinez’s presentation will focus on the theme of that book, a need for a relationship with a loving creator as the key to solving the world’s great human and natural crises.

Mary and her husband, Michael Taylor, met Dr Martinez when the economist was teaching at Yale School of Forestry in 2006 and developed an ongoing friendship with him. The Taylors took advantage of Dr Martinez’s annual summer visit to the United States, this year to deliver a presentation at environmental and theological conference in Colorado, to invite him to speak in Newtown.

“He is not primarily a writer,” said Ms Taylor, “but an amazing project manager for all kinds of projects in Sierra Leone, in Peru, and in many places. Recently one of his most cherished projects, a Honduras-Nicaragua binational peace park, was approved by both governments. He also coordinates a scientific network dealing with water and poverty that includes 50 scientists in basically all countries of Latin America.”

His works deal with solidarity and development from the perspective of looking at the human person in a way that does not reduce that person to something that serves a state, or a consumer, Ms Taylor explained.

“If sustainability, understood just as the potential for long-term maintenance of well-being, which in turn depends on the well-being of the natural world and the responsible use of natural resources, is the only answer to the environmental crisis, we are missing something, a relevant part of our relationship with nature which takes place in four steps: a) From reality to amazement, b) from amazement to a need for meaning, c) from meaning to the sense of sacred, and d) from this sense of sacred to something able to answer our need of meaning and lead us into action,” said Dr Martinez in an email to The Newtown Bee this week.

He expressed his belief that when people open themselves to reality, they can be open to the beauty around them and the power that beauty has to bring people together.

“Questions arise when reality hits us,” he said. Explaining further in a phone call, Dr Martinez added, “My experience is not so much giving answers, but making questions to help people to understand things by making questions of their own experiences. I try to help people to ‘wake up’ their questions.

“For several years, with some of my graduate students from Yale and Rey Juan Carlos, I have been conducting research in the pinewood forests in the mountains along the border between Nicaragua and Honduras… Amazingly, people from different backgrounds began joining me in the project. Everyone had started research in his or her own area: water, policy, social studies, silviculture, law… On the other hand, I have been also surprised by the empathy in general and the friendship in some cases that started to grow among us. Why did both things happen at the same time? I think that we all have this inexplicable intuition that tells us that when we save beauty, we save ourselves by following something that has a deep connection with ourselves; a correspondence that we do not understand in its totality but that can be revealed,” said Dr Martinez.

“Dr Martinez deeply practices what he preaches,” said Ms Taylor, “that solidarity and friendship are more important than anything else in all work, not just in rural development. He is motivated by wonder and the love of beauty and nature.”